Laurent Garnier Public Outburst

Jazz and techno may not seem to have much to do with each other, but they keep grinding up against each other, from Herbie Hancock's percussive contributions to the language of electronic music, as well as his innovations in funky machine music, to genre fusionists like St. Germain (and every house DJ who has ever thrown an instrumentalist onto his set for "spontaneity") and even collaborations between Matthew Shipp and the Blue Series musicians with forward thinking hip hop artists like El-P and the late, lamented Antipop Consortium (we'll leave lightweights like LTJ Bukem out of this conversation). Perhaps, despite a whole aesthetic built around the mystique of machine music and its sci fi implications and anonymity, electronic musicians, particularly as they age, can smart over the neglect in esteem they suffer from antiquated concepts. The manual skill of instrument playing and the "live" experience are still exalted, and the jazz combo gets the most blind respect for this, even if the rockers get more ignorant sex thrown their way. Anyway, jazz, with its lengthy meditations and boilings of basic themes, has always provided some of the best sample material, as well as pioneering the musical concept so important to techno, the constant beat as platform for subtle and exuberant exploration. Jazz musicians, meanwhile, have always had an itch against all commercial sense to clash and dabble with the most innovative ideas in pop, and have long used electronic music as a futuristic tabula raza to mess around in.

Frenchman Laurent Garnier is an old figure on the electronic landscape, credited through his DJing in the 80s at Manchester's legendary Hacienda with being a key player in forming the European rave movement by bringing Chicago House and Detroit Techno (both highly influenced by British synth pop, it's all circular) to the Factory scene, spawning both the house flourishes of bands such as the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and the beat innovation that would start in England towards the end of that decade. Now in his (gasp) forties, having made a few of his own albums and being a major force influencing the swank, sometimes even laughably kitschy but nearly always irresistable French House juggernaut, Garnier spent his last summer vacation doing live shows with friends Bugge Wesseltoft and Benjamin Rippert, both on keys, and Phillipe Nadaud on brass. On the resultant album, Public Outburst, the spectre of noodling irrelevance looms heavily, but repeated listenings tend to intrigue rather than exhaust, and a little patience reaps rewards.

In this jazzy techno sandwich, perhaps Garnier intends to throw down the gauntlet by making the bread out of the longest and most possibly ponderous tracks, 63 and Barbiturik Blues, placing them first and last. While both seem questionable to cynical ears, with glacially slow, essentially downtempo beats offering open ground for strange noise wankery and overextended passages from the instrumentalists, they both ultimately make good on the ample space they manufacture. The instrumental vamps and concepts keep the pieces from droning into monotony, as do dubby production tweaks and augmentations that are unhinged from the minimal perfection of Berlin. Something must be sacrificed, of course, and the neither the tracks nor the album reach the heights of a perfect four on the floor house anthem or a jazz combo exploding in synchronicity, but the tracks do manage to build pleasingly and offer surprises as well as phases of beauty. When the airy keyboard phases and warped, relatively mellow acid derived loops sync into the beat on 63 as the instrumentalists peak, the results are scintillating. The tracks between are not as languid and drawn out, and tend to benefit from the tighter focus, playing to different extremes of the approach. A track like Butterfly emphasizes the languid beauty of minimal ambient techno beats with mild keyboard embellishments before growing into a French House barnburner. First Reactions incorporates emceeing and jacked up breaks to deliver a finely tuned jungle riff. Silliness and laziness pop up occasionally, as they will on a relatively live, somewhat improvisatory collection such as this, but mostly Garnier just delivers fine goods in a series of invigorating explorations of jazz and electronic music. It is not a grenade blast aiming to reinvent the wheel then blow it up and arrange the pieces into a new genre to refute all others, but rather the relaxed, joyful sound of what amounts to an elder statesman in this crazy electronic world giving him the space to do what interests him.